Can Jealousy Make You Blind?

By Cara

Wednesday, April 14, 2010, 15:54

All of have ben brought up with the idea that jealousy is bad. But have you ever imagined, how bad can jealousy be? Jealousy can truly make a person blind.

According to a new study, it was found that women who were made to feel jealous were so distracted by unpleasant emotional turmoil they became unable to spot targets they were trying to find.

The results of the study reveal something profound about social relationships and perceptions. It was known that emotions involved in social relationships affect mental and physical health, but it has been established that social emotions can also literally affect our vision.

Psychology professors, Steven Most and Jean-Philippe Laurenceau and their colleagues tested heterosexual romantic couples in a lab experiment. The romantic partners sat near each other at separate computers. The woman was asked to detect targets (pictures of landscapes) amid rapid streams of images, while trying to ignore occasional emotionally unpleasant images.

The man was first asked to rate the attractiveness of landscapes that appeared on his screen and then to rate the attractiveness of other single women.

At the end, the females were asked how uneasy they felt about their partner rating other women's attractiveness.

It was seen that more jealous the women felt, the more they were distracted by unpleasant images so that they could not see the desired images.

This relationship between jealousy and "emotion-induced blindness" emerged only during the time that the male partner was rating other women.